YDR/YSN wins coveted Sweepstakes in Keystone Press Award competition

Managing Editor Randy Parker standing on the desk to tell the York Daily Record/Sunday News staff about winning the Sweepstakes Award in Keystone Press Awards competition. This desk-standing routine on awards day has been in play at the YDR for 20 years. Parker has scored the honor for the past 10 years.

The York Daily Record/Sunday News brought home top honors in its division in Keystone Press Awards competition, the most-coveted journalism competition in Pennsylvania.

Our staffers won 22 awards in their division covering news organizations with 40,000-74,999 circulation, the second largest circulation category. A gratifying element of the results is that we won first, second or honorable mention in 18 of the contest’s 29 categories, showing a balance of skills across the newsroom.

Something we discussed the other day, even before this good news:

Our newsroom producing content for our 55,000/85,000- circulation newspaper and array of digital products works at the level of a metro newsroom, meaning a big city operation. But our newsroom thinks at the level of the smallest weekly, meaning we place great value in community or neighborhood news.

And another quick thought. It’s interesting that a digital-first newsroom – where we publish digitally first and then into the newspaper when the time comes – can win in a print-oriented competition. I’ve written before that digital first practices and workflows do not mean a degradation of newspaper quality. In fact, just the opposite. The results of this contest support that.

We also won the coveted John V.R. Bull Freedom of Information Award for our staffwide work covering right to know, open government and open records topics. The epicenter of these initiatives are in and around Sunday Editor Scott Blanchard’s blog: Record Tracker.

This print-oriented contest features a growing number of digital categories among the contest’s 29.

A team of eight of our journalists won a first place in online special project for their work coinciding with the end of the space shuttle program: Making Contact.